Littlepage soon learned Russian, was renamed Ivan Eduardovich and with unflagging drive "set about verifying calculations, designs, estimates, plans of work.
However, I hadn't worked many weeks in Russia before I encountered unquestionable instances of deliberate and malicious wrecking... we removed from the oil reservoir [of a large Diesel engine] about a quart of quartz sand... such petty industrial sabotage was, and still is, so common in all branches of Soviet industry... that the police have had to create a whole army of professional and amateur spies to cut the amount down...[10] [because] the authorities in Russia have been fighting a whole series of open or disguised civil wars.
"[14] The authorities use forced labor consisting not only of small farmers, but of every other group [deemed] socially undesirable [for examples] former priests and Mohammedan holy men...
In fact, the authorities... treat a brutal murderer, as a rule, with more consideration than a small farmer who didn't want to turn his domestic animals and house and garden into a common pool with his neighbors to make a collective farm.
[15] [bolding added] Littlepage's success earned him the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and a Soviet-built Ford Model A the latter being regarded as one of the most precious gifts of the time in the USSR.
Littlepage left the USSR shortly after an interview at the US embassy in Moscow on 22 September 1937 in which he asserted his opinion that Soviet industry Commissar Georgy Pyatakov had organized "wrecking" in various gold mines.
Even when responding to questions from the US War Department, Littlepage did not mention the legions of slaves deployed to extract the gold in lethal conditions in the frozen wastelands of the Gulag in north-eastern Siberia.
[17] Littlepage authored a book on his experience: "In Search of Soviet Gold" jointly with foreign correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post and The Christian Science Monitor Demaree Bess[21][22][23] (Jan 1, 1938), ISBN 0405030444.